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C HAP TER 12 European Society in the Age of the Renaissance 1350−1550 CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES 2. After reading and studying this chapter, students should be able to: 1. Explain how politics and economics shaped the Renaissance. 2. Identify the new ideas associated with the Renaissance. 3. Analyze how art reflected new Renaissance ideals. 4. Discuss the key social hierarchies in Renaissance Europe. 5. Trace the evolution of nation-states in this period. ANNOTATED CHAPTER OUTLINE The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter. I. Wealth and Power in Renaissance Italy A. Trade and Prosperity 1. The Renaissance, a French word meaning “rebirth,” refers to the rebirth of the culture of classical antiquity that began in 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. the fourteenth century in the city-states of northern Italy. By the middle of the twelfth century, Venice, supported by a huge merchant marine, had grown enormously rich through overseas trade, as had Genoa and Milan. Important advances in shipbuilding enabled those cities’ ships to sail all year long at accelerated speeds and carry ever more merchandise. Florence, another commercial leader situated on the Arno River in a favorable location on the main road northward from Rome that made it a commercial hub, had grown wealthy through international trade. Florentine merchants loaned and invested money, and they acquired control of papal banking toward the end of the thirteenth century. The profits from loans, investments, and money exchanges that poured back to Florence contributed to the city’s economic vitality and allowed banking families to control the city’s politics and culture. Despite several crises that hit Florence in the fourteenth century—England’s 181 182 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE repudiation of its debts, the loss of life from the Black Death, and labor unrest— the basic Florentine economic structure remained stable. 8. Wealth allowed many people in Florence and other thriving Italian cities greater material pleasures, a more comfortable life, and the leisure time to appreciate and patronize the arts. 9. The rich, who commissioned public and private buildings and hired artists to decorate their homes and churches, came to see life more as an opportunity to be enjoyed than as a painful pilgrimage to the City of God. B. Communes and Republics of Northern Italy 1. The northern Italian cities were communes, sworn associations of free men who began to seek political and economic independence from local nobles in the twelfth century. 2. The merchant guilds that formed the communes built and maintained the city walls, regulated trade, collected taxes, and kept civil order. 3. Local nobles frequently moved into the cities, marrying the daughters of rich commercial families and starting their own businesses, often with money gained through their wives’ dowries. 4. This merger of the northern Italian nobility and the commercial elite created a powerful oligarchy, yet rivalries among these families often made Italian communes politically unstable. 5. The common people (the popolo) were disenfranchised and heavily taxed, and they bitterly resented their exclusion from power. 6. Throughout most of the thirteenth century, in city after city, the popolo used armed force to take over the city governments and establish republican governments, in which political power theoretically resides in the people and is exercised by their chosen representatives. 7. Because the popolo could not establish civil order within their cities, merchant oligarchies reasserted their power and sometimes brought in powerful military leaders called condottieri to establish order. 8. Many cities in Italy became signori, in which one man ruled and handed down the right to rule to his son. 9. These oligarchic regimes maintained a façade of communal government, but the judicial, executive, and legislative functions of government were restricted to a small class of wealthy merchants. 10. The signori and merchant oligarchs of many cities transformed their households into courts and displayed their wealth and power by becoming patrons of the arts; they hired architects to build private palaces and public city halls, artists to fill them with paintings and sculptures, and musicians and composers to fill them with music. 11. Ceremonies connected with visiting rulers, family births, baptisms, marriages, and funerals offered occasions for magnificent pageantry and elaborate ritual. 12. Rulers of nation-states later copied and adapted all these aspects of Italian courts. C. City-States and the Balance of Power 1. Renaissance Italians had a passionate attachment to their individual city-states, which hindered the development of a single unified state. 2. In the fifteenth century, Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples dominated the Italian peninsula, controlling the smaller citystates. 3. Venice, which ranked as an international power, was a republic in name, but an oligarchy of merchant-aristocrats actually ran the city. 4. Milan was also called a republic, but the condottieri–turned-signori of the Sforza family ruled harshly and dominated Milan C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. and several smaller cities in the north from 1447 to 1535. In Florence the form of government was republican, but in reality the great Medici banking family held power almost continually for three centuries beginning in 1434. Most Renaissance popes were members of powerful Italian families, selected for their political skills, not their piety. South of the Papal States, the kingdom of Naples was under the control of the king of Aragon. Whenever one Italian state appeared to gain a predominant position within the peninsula, other states combined against it to establish a balance of power. One of the great political achievements of the Italian Renaissance was the establishment of permanent embassies with resident ambassadors in capitals where political relations and commercial ties needed continual monitoring. When Florence and Naples entered into an agreement to acquire Milanese territories at the end of the fifteenth century, Milan called on France for support, and the French king Charles VIII (r. 1483–1498) invaded Italy in 1494. Florentines interpreted the French invasion as the fulfillment of a prophecy by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), who had predicted that God would punish Italy for its moral vice and corrupt leadership, and they expelled the Medici dynasty. Savonarola became the leader of a new Florentine republic; he reorganized the government, convincing it to pass laws against same-sex relations, adultery, and drunkenness, and staged “bonfires of the vanities.” For a time Savonarola was wildly popular, but eventually people tired of his moral denunciations; after he was excommunicated by the pope, tortured, 183 and burned at the stake, the Medici returned to rule Florence. 14. The French invasion inaugurated a new period in European power politics in which Italy became the focus of international ambitions and the battleground of foreign armies, particularly those of France and the Holy Roman Empire in a series of conflicts called the Habsburg-Valois wars. 15. The Italian cities suffered from continual warfare, especially in the sack of Rome in 1527 by emperor Charles V. 16. The failure of the city-states to consolidate, or at least to establish a common foreign policy, led to centuries of subjection by outside invaders. II. Intellectual Change A. Humanism 1. Art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was the first to use the word “Renaissance” in print, but he was not the first to feel that something was being reborn. 2. The Florentine poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) traveled Europe searching for classical Latin manuscripts because he felt the writers of ancient Rome had reached a level of perfection that had not since been duplicated; Petrarch believed that writers of his day should follow these ancient models and ignore the period between the fall of Rome, which he termed the “dark ages,” 3. Petrarch believed that the recovery of classical texts would bring about a new golden age of intellectual achievement, an idea that many others came to share. 4. He proposed a new kind of education in which young men would study the works of ancient Roman authors, using them as models of how to write clearly, argue effectively, and speak persuasively. 5. The study of Latin classics became known as the studia humanitates, usually translated as the “liberal arts”; those who 184 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. advocated it were known as humanists and their program as humanism. Humanism, the main intellectual component of the Renaissance, contained an implicit philosophy: human nature and achievements were worthy of contemplation. He admired the works of the Roman author and statesman Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), including his use of language, literary style, and political ideas. Many humanists saw Julius Caesar’s transformation of Rome as the beginning of a long period of decline, including Leonardo Bruni (1374–1444), who closely linked the decline of the Latin language after Cicero’s death to the decline of the Roman Republic. Bruni was the first to divide history into three eras—ancient, medieval, and modern—though another humanist historian actually invented the term “Middle Ages.” In the fifteenth century, Florentine humanists became increasingly interested in Greek philosophy, especially the ideas of Plato. Under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), the scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) translated Plato’s dialogues into Latin, attempting to synthesize Christian and Platonic teachings. Plato’s emphasis on the spiritual and eternal over the material and transient— the Platonic ideal—fit well with Christian teachings about the immortality of the soul. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463– 1494), Ficino’s most brilliant student, believed that both Christian and classical texts taught that the universe was a hierarchy of beings from God down through spiritual beings to material beings, with humanity as the crucial link possessing both material and spiritual natures. 14. Renaissance thinkers believed man’s divinely bestowed nature meant that there were no limits to individual achievement, especially for those with the admirable quality of virtù, the ability to shape the world around them according to their will. 15. Bruni and other historians included biographies of individuals with virtù, including artists, in their histories of cities and nations that described the ways in which these people affected the course of history. 16. In one such work, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari even included himself among the models of excellence and perfection. 17. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) similarly described his personal qualities and many accomplishments in his autobiography. 18. Following Plato’s ideas, humanist authors speculated about perfect examples of things; Alberti wrote about the ideal country house, and Thomas More described the perfect society. B. Education 1. Humanists thought that studying the classics would provide essential skills for future diplomats, lawyers, politicians, military leaders, businessmen, writers, and artists and would provide a much broader and more practical type of training than that offered at universities. 2. Humanists taught that a life active in the world should be the aim of all educated individuals and that education was not only for private or religious purposes but also for the public good. 3. Beginning in the early fifteenth century, humanists opened schools and academies in Italian cities and courts in which pupils learned Latin grammar and rhetoric, C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE Roman history and political philosophy, and Greek literature and philosophy. 4. Humanist schools were established in other Italian cities, as well as in Germany, France, and England; humanist education became the basis for education for wellto-do urban boys and men. 5. Humanists disagreed about education for women, whose sphere was generally understood to be private and domestic. 6. Humanist academies were not open to women, but a few women who became educated in the classics through tutors or self-study argued that reason was not limited to men and that learning was compatible with virtue for women as well as men. 7. No book on education had broader influence than Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528). 8. According to Castiglione, the educated man should have a broad background in many academic subjects; his spiritual and physical as well as intellectual capabilities should be trained; and above all, he should speak and write eloquently. 9. Castiglione also discussed the perfect court lady, who was to be well educated and able to paint, dance, and play a musical instrument and who should possess physical beauty, delicacy, affability, and modesty. 10. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Courtier was translated into most European languages and widely read, influencing the social mores and patterns of conduct of elite groups in Renaissance and early modern Europe, as well as those aspiring to rise in the social hierarchy. C. Political Thought 1. Humanists wrote biographies that described kings as just, wise, pious, learned, and kind; however, such ideal rulers were hard to find, so they looked to the classical past for models. 185 2. Some argued that republicanism was the best form of government, while others used Plato’s model of the philosopherking to argue that rule by an enlightened individual might be best. 3. Both sides agreed, however, that educated men should be active in the political affairs of their city, a position historians have since termed “civic humanism.” 4. The most famous civic humanist, and ultimately the best-known political theorist of this era, was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). 5. In The Prince (1513), Machiavelli uses the examples of classical and contemporary rulers to argue that the function of a ruler (or any government) is to preserve order and security by using any means necessary, but not by doing anything that would turn the populace against him. 6. Machiavelli’s primary contemporary example was Cesare Borgia (1475?– 1507), who built up a state in central Italy by using new military equipment and tactics, hiring Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) as a military engineer, and murdering his political enemies. 7. Borgia’s state ultimately collapsed, which Machiavelli ascribed to fate, rather than weakness. 8. The Prince is often seen as the first modern guide to politics, though Machiavelli was denounced for writing it, and people later came to use the word “Machiavellian” to mean cunning and ruthless. 9. In contrast to the medieval idea that governments should be judged on moral principles established by God, Machiavelli argued that governments should be judged by how well they provided security, order, and safety to their populace; he believed that a ruler’s moral code in maintaining these was not the same as a private individual’s. 186 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 10. Most scholars regard Machiavelli as realistic or even cynical, but some suggest that he was being ironic or satirical, showing princely government in the worst possible light to contrast it with republicanism. D. Christian Humanism 1. Northern humanists shared the ideas of Ficino and Pico about the wisdom of ancient texts, but they viewed humanist learning as a way to bring about reform of the church and deepen people’s spiritual lives. 2. These Christian humanists thought that the best elements of classical and Christian cultures should be combined. 3. The English humanist Thomas More (1478–1535) wrote the controversial dialogue Utopia (1516), which describes a community on an island where all children receive a good education, and adults divide their days between manual labor or business pursuits and intellectual activities. 4. In More’s Utopia, poverty and hunger have been solved by a beneficent government, and although religious toleration and reason prevail, dissent and disagreement are not acceptable. 5. More’s purposes in writing Utopia have been greatly debated: some view it as a revolutionary critique of More’s own hierarchical and violent society, some as a call for an even firmer hierarchy, and others as part of the humanist tradition of satire. 6. The fame of Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) rested largely on scholarly editions and translations, as well as popular works. 7. Erasmus’s long list of publications includes The Praise of Folly (1509), a satire poking fun at political, social, and religious institutions; and a new Latin translation of the New Testament alongside the first printed edition of the Greek Text (1516). 8. Two fundamental themes run through Erasmus’s work: first, education in the Bible and the classics is the key to reform and moral and intellectual improvement; second, renewal should be based on “the philosophy of Christ,” an emphasis on inner spirituality and personal morality, rather than on scholastic theology or outward observances. E. The Printed Word 1. The ideas of Petrarch spread slowly from person to person by hand copying, while the ideas of Erasmus spread quickly through print. 2. Printing with movable metal type developed in Germany in the 1440s as a combination of existing technologies. 3. Johann Gutenberg and other metal-smiths made metal stamps—later called type— for every letter of the alphabet, which could then be covered with ink and used to mark the letters onto a surface. 4. They also built racks that held the type in rows, which meant that the type could be rearranged for every page and used over and over. 5. The ready availability of paper also enabled the printing revolution. 6. By the fifteenth century, the increase in urban literacy, the development of primary schools, and the opening of more universities had created an expanding market for reading materials of all types. 7. Other craftsmen made their own type and built their own presses, setting themselves up in business, and within a half century of the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible in 1456, between 8 and 20 million books were printed in Europe. 8. Although the effects of the invention of movable-type printing were not felt overnight, movable type radically transformed the private and public lives of Europeans. C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 9. Printers had connections to the world of politics, art, and scholarship that other craftsmen did not. 10. Printing gave hundreds or even thousands of people identical books, so that they could more easily discuss the ideas contained in the books with one another in person or through letters. 11. Printed materials allowed individuals to join causes and groups separated by geography and form a common identity, or group consciousness. 12. Government and church leaders both used and worried about printing: they printed laws, declarations of war, battle accounts, and propaganda, but they also attempted to censor books and authors whose ideas they thought challenged their authority or were wrong. 13. Officials prohibited certain books and authors and enforced this by confiscating books, arresting printers and booksellers, or destroying the presses of disobedient printers, although books printed secretly were smuggled all over Europe. 14. Printing stimulated the literacy of laypeople and eventually came to have a deep effect on their private lives. 15. Although most of the earliest books and pamphlets dealt with religious subjects, printers produced anything that would sell, including professional reference sets, historical romances, biographies, and how-to manuals, some of which contained woodcuts and engravings. 16. Books and other printed materials were read aloud to illiterate listeners, bridging the gap between written and oral cultures. III. Art and the Artist A. Patronage and Power 1. No feature of the Renaissance evokes greater admiration than the dazzling creativity that emerged in painting, architecture, and sculpture of the 1400s and 1500s. 187 2. Powerful urban groups often flaunted their wealth by commissioning works of art in early Renaissance Italy. 3. In the later fifteenth century, wealthy merchants, bankers, popes, and rulers, rather than corporate groups, sponsored works of art as a means of glorifying themselves and their families. 4. Patrons varied in their level of involvement as a work progressed; some simply ordered a specific subject or scene, while others closely oversaw the work of the artist or architect, making suggestions and demanding changes. 5. Pope Julius II (pontificate 1503–1513) commissioned the Florentine Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel in 1508, visiting him frequently with suggestions and criticisms. 6. Art reveals changing patterns of consumption among the wealthy elite, with nobles spending less of their money on military gear as they adjusted to an urban culture. 7. For the noble who recently arrived from the countryside or the rich merchant, a grand urban palace adorned with embroidered tablecloths, wall tapestries, and paintings represented the greatest outlay of cash. 8. After the palace itself, the private chapel within the palace symbolized the largest expenditure for the wealthy of the sixteenth century. 9. The chapel served as the center of the household’s religious life and its cult of remembrance of the dead. B. Changing Artistic Styles 1. Religious topics remained popular in Renaissance art, although the patron often had himself and his family included in the scene; as humanist ideas spread, classical themes and motifs, such as the lives and loves of pagan gods and goddesses, became more common. 188 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 2. The individual portrait emerged as a distinct genre; Renaissance portraits showed human ideals, often portrayed in a more realistic style. 3. The Florentine painter Giotto (1276– 1337) led the way in the use of realism, especially in his more natural treatment of the human body and face. 4. Piero della Francesca (1420–1492) and Andrea Mantegna (1430/31–1506) pioneered perspective in painting, the linear representation of distance and space on a flat surface. 5. The sculptor Donatello (1386–1466) revived the classical figure, with its balance and self-awareness. 6. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) looked to the classical past for inspiration in designing buildings that achieved a sense of balance and harmony. 7. Art in northern Europe tended to be more religious in orientation than in Italy. 8. Flemish painters, notably Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–1464) and Jan van Eyck (1366–1441)—one of the first artists to use oil-based paints successfully—were considered the artistic equals of Italian painters. 9. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg rendered the human form and natural world in intricate detail and designed mechanical devices that could assist artists in solving the problems of perspective. 10. In the early sixteenth century, the center of the new art shifted from Florence to Rome, as Renaissance popes expended huge sums of money to beautify the city. 11. Michelangelo went to Rome and began a series of statues, paintings, and architectural projects that gained international renown, including the Pietà, Moses (the redesigning of the Capitoline Hill) and, most famously, the dome for Saint Peter’s and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 12. Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) became the most sought after artist in Europe, overseeing a large workshop with many collaborators and writing treatises on his philosophy of art in which he emphasized the importance of imitating nature and developing an orderly sequence of design and proportion. 13. Titian (1490–1576) and other sixteenthcentury painters developed an artistic style known as “mannerism” in which artists sometimes distorted figures, exaggerated musculature, and heightened color to express emotion and drama more intently. C. The Renaissance Artist 1. Some patrons rewarded certain artists very well, and some artists gained public acclaim as “rare men of genius.” 2. Renaissance artists and humanists came to think that a work of art was the deliberate creation of a unique personality who transcended traditions, rules, and theories. 3. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci perhaps best embody the new concept of the Renaissance artist as genius. 4. Though they might be men of genius, artists still were expected to be well trained, and most Renaissance artists trained in the workshops of older artists, where they learned proper artistic techniques and stylistic conventions. 5. Beginning artists spent years mastering their craft by copying drawings and paintings; learning how to prepare paint and other materials; and, by the sixteenth century, reading books about design and composition. 6. Some informal groups of younger artists, who gathered in the evenings for drawing practice, turned into more formal artistic “academies” by the late sixteenth century. 7. The notion of artistic genius was gendered; all the most famous and most prolific Renaissance artists were male, and the types of art that women produced, such as textiles, needlework, and painting C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE on porcelain, were deemed “minor” or “decorative” arts. 8. Several women became well-known painters, most of them daughters of painters or minor noblemen with ties to artistic circles or eldest daughters from families without sons, but they were not allowed to study the male nude, learn the technique of fresco, or join a group of male artists for informal practice. 9. Artistic workshops were male-only settings in which men of different ages came together for training and created bonds of friendship, influence, patronage, and sometimes intimacy. 10. Most scholars and artists came from families with some money; humanist ideas did not influence the lives of most people in cities and did not affect life in the villages at all. IV. Social Hierarchies A. Race and Slavery 1. Renaissance people often used the words “race,” “people,” and “nation” interchangeably; they made distinctions based on skin color, but these distinctions were interwoven with other characteristics. 2. Since the time of the Roman republic, a small number of black Africans had lived in western Europe; they had come, along with white slaves, as the spoils of war. 3. Unstable political conditions in many parts of Africa enabled enterprising merchants to seize people and sell them into slavery. 4. Local authorities afforded them no protection in a culture where tradition sanctioned the practice of slavery. 5. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors began bringing Africans to markets in the Mediterranean, and by 1530 between four thousand and five thousand were sold to the Portuguese each year. 6. By the mid-sixteenth century, blacks, both slaves and free, made up about 10 percent 189 of the Portuguese population, and cities such as Lisbon had significant numbers of people of mixed African and European descent. 7. Although blacks were concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula, black servants were much sought after in northern Italy and other parts of Europe, in part because of a continuing interest in curiosities and the exotic. 8. In Portugal, Spain, and Italy, slaves supplemented the labor force in virtually all occupations. 9. Most Europeans perceived Africa as a remote place, the home of strange people isolated by heresy and Islam from superior European civilization. 10. The expanding slave trade only reinforced negative preconceptions about the inferiority of black Africans. B. Wealth and the Nobility 1. The word “class” was not used in the Renaissance to describe social divisions, but by the thirteenth century, the idea of a hierarchy based on wealth was emerging, especially in cities. 2. This hierarchy of wealth was more fluid than the older divisions into noble and commoner, allowing individuals and families to rise—and fall—within one generation. 3. The development of a hierarchy of wealth did not mean an end to the prominence of nobles, however, and even poorer nobles still had higher status than wealthy commoners. 4. The nobility maintained its status in most parts of Europe not by adhering to rigid boundaries, but by taking in and integrating the new social elite of wealth, often through marriage. 5. Along with being tied to hierarchies of wealth and family standing, social status also was linked to considerations of honor in warfare and occupations. 190 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 6. In cities, sumptuary laws reflected both wealth and honor. C. Gender Roles 1. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, learned men (and a few women) began what was termed the querelle des femmes, a debate about women’s character and nature. 2. Misogynist critiques of women from both clerical and secular authors denounced females as devious, domineering, and demanding, which prompted several authors to compile lists of praiseworthy women. 3. Christine de Pizan was among those writers who were interested not only in defending women but also in exploring the reasons behind women’s secondary status, thus anticipating discussions about the “social construction of gender.” 4. The development of the printing press spurred interest in the debate about women, circulating various works and popularizing prints that juxtaposed female virtues and vices. 5. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the debate about women also became one about female rulers and about whether gender or rank was the stronger determinant of character and social role. 6. Despite a prevailing sentiment that women were not as fit to rule as men, there were no successful rebellions against female rulers simply because they were women, in part because female rulers emphasized qualities regarded as masculine. 7. Ideas about women’s and men’s proper roles determined the actions of ordinary men and women even more forcefully. 8. The dominant notion of the “true” man was that of the married head of household; unmarried men whose social status and age would have normally conferred political power did not participate in politics to the same level. 9. Women also were understood as “married or to be married,” which meant that women’s work was not viewed as supporting a family—even if it did—and women who worked for wages earned about half to two-thirds of what men did, even for the same work. 10. Maintaining power relationships in which men were dominant and women subordinate symbolized the proper functioning of society, and disorder in the gender hierarchy was linked with social upheaval and viewed as threatening. 11. Of all the ways in which Renaissance society was hierarchically arranged— social rank, age, level of education, race, occupation—gender was regarded as the most “natural” and thus the most important to defend. V. Politics and the State in Western Europe A. France 1. The Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War left France drastically depopulated, commercially ruined, and agriculturally weak, but Charles VII (r. 1422–1461) revived the monarchy and France. 2. By reconciling warring factions within France, expelling the English, reorganizing the royal council, and strengthening royal finances through taxes on certain products and land, Charles began France’s recovery. 3. Charles also created the first permanent royal army anywhere in Europe. 4. Louis XI (r. 1461–1483) used the army to control nobles’ militias and to conquer Burgundy, and he gained other territory through inheritance. 5. The marriage of Louis XII (r. 1498–1515) to Anne of Brittany further enlarged the state of France. 6. In the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, French king Francis I and Pope Leo X reached an agreement that allowed the French ruler to select bishops and abbots C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE and, thus, control the policies of church officials. B. England 1. The aristocracy dominated the government of Henry IV (r. 1399–1413) and indulged in disruptive violence at the local level. 2. A decline in population and the chronic disorder caused by the Wars of the Roses hurt trade, agriculture, and domestic industry. 3. Edward IV (r. 1461–1483), his brother Richard III (r. 1483–1485), and Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) used Machiavellian methods to reconstruct the monarchy, restore royal prestige, crush the power of the nobility, and establish order and law at the local level. 4. Edward IV and subsequently the Tudors, except Henry VIII, conducted foreign policy on the basis of diplomacy, avoiding expensive wars and thus undercutting Parliament’s influence. 5. Because Henry VII distrusted much of the nobility, he chose small landowners and urban residents trained in law to be members of his royal council, which governed at the national level. 6. The council dealt with real or potential aristocratic threats through a judicial offshoot, the Court of Star Chamber, which employed methods that ran counter to English common-law precedents but effectively reduced aristocratic troublemaking. 7. When Henry VII died in 1509, he left a country at peace both domestically and internationally, a substantially augmented treasury, an expanding wool trade, and a crown with its dignity and role much enhanced. C. Spain 1. The marriage of the dynamic and aggressive Isabella of Castile and the crafty and persistent Ferdinand of Aragon constituted a dynastic union of two royal 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 191 houses, not the political union of two peoples. Although Ferdinand and Isabella (r. 1474– 1516) pursued a common foreign policy, Spain continued to exist as a loose confederation of separate kingdoms, each maintaining its own cortes (parliament), laws, courts, and system of taxation. Ferdinand and Isabella curbed aristocratic power by excluding high nobles from the royal council, which had full executive, judicial, and legislative powers under the monarchy, and instead appointing lesser landowners. They secured the right to appoint bishops in Spain and in the Hispanic territories in America. With revenues from ecclesiastical estates, they expanded their territories to include the remaining lands held by Arabs in southern Spain. The victorious entry of Ferdinand and Isabella into Granada on January 6, 1492, signaled the conclusion of the reconquista. The majority of Spanish people viewed the Jews as potentially dangerous. Even though Jewish industry, intelligence, and money had supported royal power and financed many Christian businesses and ventures, a strong undercurrent of resentment of Jewish influence and wealth festered. Anti-Semitic pogroms swept the towns of Spain in the fourteenth century, and perhaps 40 percent of the Jewish population was killed or forced to convert. Those converted—conversos, or New Christians—were often well educated and held prominent positions in government, the church, medicine, law, and business. Aristocrats resented their financial dependence on conversos; the poor hated the converso tax collectors, and churchmen doubted the sincerity of their conversions. 192 C HAPTER 12 • E UROPEAN S OCIETY IN THE A GE OF THE R ENAISSANCE 12. In 1478 Queen Isabella and Ferdinand established their own Inquisition to “search out and punish converts from Judaism who had transgressed against Christianity by secretly adhering to Jewish beliefs and performing rites of the Jews.” 13. Because most conversos identified as sincere Christians, officials of the Inquisition argued that a person’s status as a Jew was in their blood and was heritable, so Jews could never be true Christians. 14. “Purity of blood” laws made having pure Christian blood a requirement for noble status. 15. In 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand issued an edict expelling all practicing Jews from Spain. 16. Many Muslims in Granada were forcibly baptized and became another type of New Christian investigated by the Inquisition. 17. Absolute religious orthodoxy and purity of blood served as the theoretical foundation of the Spanish national state, while marital politics, as well as military victories and religious courts, upheld it. 18. Isabella and Ferdinand’s grandson, Charles V (r. 1519–1556), succeeded to a vast inheritance that included the Burgundian Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire. 19. Charles’s son Philip II joined Portugal to the Spanish crown in 1580, politically uniting the Iberian Peninsula.